


Forever Cursed

by RainySteve



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Depression, Heavy Angst, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, mentions of silena, mentions of silena/beckendorf, percabeth, this is straight up sad yall
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:08:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,153
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25056721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainySteve/pseuds/RainySteve
Summary: How does one lose the infamous Curse of Achilles? Short answer: you don’t.
Relationships: Annabeth Chase/Percy Jackson, Clarisse La Rue/Chris Rodriguez
Comments: 20
Kudos: 274
Collections: PJO/HOO Big Bang 2020





	Forever Cursed

**Author's Note:**

> This is my entry for the 2020 pjo/hoo big bang! @shelbychild and @wisdomofchase on tumblr were my lovely betas. I've included the collab piece that @officialpjo (lineart) and @wisdomofchase (coloring) on tumblr made for this followed by @aquacanis and @silima (on tumblr) pieces. Also, I MIGHT re-visit this and add a more upbeat epilogue but I promise nothing lol. 
> 
> This was really self-indulgent and fun to work on! I loved my team and I hope y'all enjoy it.

It starts with a fever. 

It makes the demons inside Percy’s head all that more real. It’s harder to ground himself with the sight of his cabin back at camp. It makes his eyelids heavy, the fog and the heat of Tartarus all-encompassing. 

He pulls himself to a sitting position at the edge of his bed, letting his head fall to his hands; his fingers run through his sweat-matted hair. The burning in his skin is real. It presses against his palms, and it makes his brain short-circuit. 

_I’m not there. I’m not there. I’m not there._

But he’s burning all over, and his blood feels like it’s boiling. 

He can feel the sting of the Phlegethon down his throat. The scar on his shoulder aches as if it’s been torn apart all over again, but, unlike other nights, the pain moves all over, and keeps his breath in a choke-hold. 

_I’m not. I’m not there. I can’t be there._

The pain blinds him, his cabin disappears, and his thoughts are extinguished to nothing but the pain.

Then, just as suddenly as it came, it subsides. Slowly, Percy can make out his stuttered breathing once again, until it’s just him, his breathing and his trembling hands, alone in his cabin. 

He’s used to feeling worn-out after an especially bad nightmare, but the exhaustion that hits him then is different. It’s too heavy. For the first time since the Giant War, he’s pulled into an immediate, dreamless slumber. 

  
  


The following morning he wakes up feeling somewhat rested, which is unusual these days. With a start he realizes he’s overslept—he’ll barely make it to breakfast in time—and throws on whatever clothes he finds laying around. 

Annabeth pulls him aside after breakfast and cups his face in one hand while she inspects the bags under his eyes. They look better; there’s some color in his face at last. She smiles before letting him know his shirt is on backwards and pulls him towards their archery lesson. 

Percy tries to mirror Annabeth’s smile, but it melts once she turns away, the familiarity of the pain from the night before setting his instincts over the edge. 

\----------

The days that follow, Percy tries to ignore all the signs. He takes on two, three, four sword-fighting classes. Chiron lets him, thinking he's gained back his interest for teaching. Percy uses it as the perfect excuse for why he needs more naps, doesn't focus on the whispers in his head telling him exactly how to take down each camper he instructs, instead giving them the best advice they've each had in years. 

He also uses the classes as an excuse to stay back and have the arena to himself. At night, he lets go. Or as much as he feels it’s safe to do so. Unlike last time, when he only gained speed, strength, agility, the ground shakes beneath his feet as well. 

That’s usually when he stops. 

He’s strung out, he tells himself. He still hasn’t recovered control, not after what happened in Tartarus. He just needs time. 

But each night he comes back the tremors come quicker and quicker. 

He strays from the canoe lake altogether. The Nereids miss him, Grover lets him know. Percy tries to avoid him as well. Grover knows him too deeply, but whatever severed his curse during his time with the Romans did lasting damage to their empathy link. Sometimes, Percy finds himself reaching for what’s no longer there. But he’s grateful it’s gone. It’s already hard enough keeping things from Annabeth. 

Percy hasn’t participated in a game of capture the flag since coming back, but neither has Annabeth. She keeps telling him he needs a project, knows how much the distraction of re-modeling Olympus has helped her. But Percy isn’t Annabeth. The first thing he was ever really good at was fighting. Annabeth has always been someone besides a soldier. Percy feels like his life before Camp was a fever dream, can’t comprehend what he used to like. 

Skateboards, basketball, his mother’s blue food. 

He tries to recall the sting of scraping his knees on the payment. The rush of shooting a perfect three-pointer, the burning on his tongue when he couldn’t wait for his mother’s cookies to cool down. 

What are those memories compared to the power of defeating entire armies, the ache in his gut as he summons a hurricane, brings down mountains? 

“Percy?” 

Annabeth’s voice pulls him out of his thoughts. He tries to smile the worry in her eyes away, but she’s clearly not buying it. He racks his brain to recall what she was telling him. Rachel. 

“What about Rachel?” he asks her.

“If you’ve talked to her about Goode? She told you she was going back there, right?”

She had. Percy hadn’t known what to do with the information, almost laughed at the mention of high school. He’s lost the knack for thinking ahead. 

“Yeah,” he answers, “guess she did.”

Annabeth lets him play with her fingers, interlocked in the small space between them in the small patch of sand they're sitting on. Percy can feel her choosing her words, can’t remember if she did that before. 

“Are _you_ going back? To Goode?”

Instinctively, he tightens his fists, but quickly remembers Annabeth’s hand in his and lets go. He looks away from her, unsure of how she’ll interpret his reaction. But all he can think about is how he _knows_ he could’ve broken her hand, just like that. 

“I don’t,” he gets up, suddenly feeling trapped, “I don’t know, Annabeth. Can we talk about this later?”

“Later? Percy, it’s almost September—”

“—Annabeth.”

She sets her jaw, stubborn as ever, but says: 

“Fine.”

Percy lingers for just a moment. He wants her to bite back, to argue with him, to get in his face and roll her eyes and drive him up a wall with how right she is. But he can’t trust himself to argue back. The whispers in his head are getting louder.

He looks down at her hands, half-buried in the sand; calloused, strong, skilled, flesh and bone. 

Breakable. 

He turns around and leaves. 

\------------

Percy stays in the arena until he can see the sun begin to rise.

He doesn’t even break a sweat. 

He caps Riptide and tries to keep his mind blank as he picks up the entirety of the camp’s dummies off the ground. There’s barely anything usable left but he needs to keep his hands busy. The exhaustion will hit him hard the second he stops moving, and he hates that he remembers that. 

Inevitably, the last lump of hay goes into the shed and his body practically sinks to the ground. Percy barely registers opening the door to his cabin, shedding his armor across the floor and going into the bathroom, hanging on to the sink like it’s the physical embodiment of his consciousness. 

He doesn’t want to fall asleep. He doesn’t get to decide where he goes, what nightmare he visits. From what he remembers, the naps he was forced to take while having the curse were usually dreamless, peaceful, even, but every time he woke up he’d missed something. 

Percy has already missed the better part of a year, but his sleep seems to take pity on him this time around, forcing him to remember in excruciating detail instead of taking time away from him. 

Nightmares, time, exhaustion. Those are his choices. _Not much of a choice,_ he thinks. Because that’s what this is really about. That’s what has stopped him from even thinking about the possibility that the curse might be back after all these weeks. 

He barely had a choice the first time around, cornered into it by circumstance and fear. He didn’t have much of a choice either, when he crossed into the Roman camp. Now, choosing was completely out of the question. His skin had hardened, his skill sharpened to a deadly point. 

Percy looks down at his hands, knuckles almost white with how tight he is holding on to the sink. His hands shake with anger until the granite gives away under his weight. He lets out a frustrated yell as the sink comes crashing to the ground, allowing himself to stop ignoring the increasing strength within his limbs. He flings and strikes the wall behind him, feeling the way it cracks with the impact. Then, he brings his fist crashing down on the mirror, shattering it into a million pieces. 

The sound shocks him out of his fit so the echo of the crash is bouncing off the walls until it’s gone and all he hears are his own ragged breaths. He looks down at his hands once again. They’re shaking, badly, but the small mirror pieces left behind on his knuckles don’t pull blood. He rubs his palm against them, hearing them trickle down to the floor, but all that’s left behind are angry red marks that are already starting to disappear. The crunch under his feet alerts him that he’s also swaying. When he looks down, part of his reflection stares back at him. 

A singular green eye, terrified and angry, and not at all what he remembers his reflection to be. 

  
  


\-------------

Clarisse walks into the stables to find none other than Percy Jackson brushing Blackjack's mane. The fond smile on his face lets her know he's listening in on whatever profanity-filled ramblings the pegasus is on, but she takes note of how it doesn't quite reach his eyes. None of his smiles seem to, these days. 

Percy hears her undo Porkpie’s latch and tenses right away. He tries to play it off with a casual nod her way, which she returns, but the atmosphere has changed. They try to ignore each other as they brush and prune their respective pegasi, but it’s obvious to them both how wrong it feels, how much like pretending. In a way, it had been easier for Clarisse to go in there, all those months Percy had been missing, and try to convince herself that Silena was right beside her, just out of view, humming to herself in her perfect, out-of-tune way. 

Percy hums in tune, even if it is as a response to Blackjack, his voice too low. It irks at Clarisse. Even though it makes her feel guilty (too guilty to ever admit out loud), since she _is_ glad Percy isn’t dead, after all. 

Going back to camp to faces she didn’t recognize, unable to find the campers she’d shared a home with for years, knowing they were never coming back, had been worse than any battle she’d gone into. Battle she understood, could navigate; death was surreal, jarring. Percy disappearing had almost pushed her off the edge. He was one of the last ones left. Only with Chris at her side and through Annabeth’s ever-contagious determination had she stayed sane.

Finally, she hears Percy put the brush back on the rack and collapse on the small bench with a tired “oof.” 

“Porkpie has asked me to tell you that your brushing feels like talons against his neck,” he tells Clarisse. 

“Porkpie is an ungrateful ass.”

Percy chuckles. “Ungrateful pegasus, please and thank you.”

Clarisse puts her own brush back in its place, shooting the white pegasus an annoyed glare before taking a seat on the bench opposite Percy. Gods, he looks exhausted. The bags beneath his eyes are almost purple, and his usually athletic frame is still on the thinner side, having not recovered entirely from Tartarus yet. 

“We suck at this,” he says. 

Whether he means equine grooming or life in general, Clarisse has to agree.

“She mainly used me as a distraction and did most of the work, what’s your excuse?” Clarisse doesn’t have to say Silena’s name. Inside the stables, her presence is everywhere. 

“I was a ‘pretty face with good conversation’ as she put it. She liked that I could tell her what the pegasi were saying.” 

Percy smiles at the memory and Clarisse can’t help but smile back. Only Silena could pull off that comment as endearing. Clarisse has heard her little sister, Drew, use similar words before and it just comes off as pretentious. 

_Be nice, she’s got a lot of growing to do,_ Clarisse can almost hear Silena say. She’d always stick up for her baby sister. It makes Clarisse sad to see how bitter Drew has grown towards her memory since the war. 

She looks back at Percy, who is already looking at her. They stay like that for a little while, neither one prompting the other to speak, reveling in the lack of pressure to do so. She thinks of that day with her godly brothers, how he’d revealed to her that he considered her a friend. She thinks even further back, to that time when he handed her the Golden Fleece. Clarisse has always had a silent understanding with Percy Jackson. When it mattered the most, when no one was looking, no bullshit allowed. 

“I can’t believe she’s gone,” she finds herself muttering. 

Percy leans his head back against the aging wood, letting himself flutter his eyes closed. “Yeah,” he agrees. “I keep thinking I’ll bump into her somewhere.”

“Half the people here now don’t even know her,” Clarisse continues. “It doesn’t make any sense. We all knew her.”

Percy winces, opening his eyes to look at her once again. “Who is ‘we’ now? _I_ don’t even know half the people out there myself.”

Clarisse tries to wrap her head around that. Percy had led them to war in Manhattan, had done so again a few months ago. Yet, those kids know him as something different, know _her_ as something different. All the people that had watched them grow up were gone. It felt like only yesterday Luke had betrayed them, like she’d _just_ had a screaming match with Michael Yew about a stupid chariot. 

“I...” Percy tries to go on, before stopping himself and closing his eyes once again. He finally settles on: “It doesn’t make any sense.” 

He sits up once again. Clarisse can tell he has more to say, but this is repurposing their relationship to do something they were used to doing with other people. It’s going to be stilted no matter what. 

“And now Drew’s unhinged,” he offers.

“Yeah,” Clarisse says, “should’ve seen her when Piper swooped in. I thought she was going to charmspeak us all into going all Julius Cesar on her.”

Percy huffs a small chuckle. 

“She was fun at counselor meetings, though. I’ll give her that,” Clarisse goes on, recalling Drew’s many requests to make ‘Manicure’ a graded camp activity to no avail. “She drove the Stolls up a wall.”

“I’m sorry I missed that, bet it was a nice change of pace.”

“Yeah,” Clarisse agrees. “I’ll miss it.”

They meet each other’s eyes. Percy allows a smile that could’ve been smug once upon a time. Once upon a time Clarisse would’ve been annoyed by it, but she smiles back. 

“I’m off in a few weeks,” she tells him. “Arizona State, Cybersecurity.”

Clarisse is glad to hear Percy laugh at that last part, though he still looks sad. He can’t help but sound slightly bitter when he says: “Didn’t offer electrified weaponry, huh?”

“I’ll pitch it to them.” Clarisse wants to hear that laugh again. She needs to leave knowing that she can hear that laugh again. “What about you? You don’t have much time left, right?”

What remained of amusement on his face melts away immediately. He goes back to avoiding her eyes, to the dead look he’s opted to wear lately. 

“I don’t know,” he says, “haven’t thought about it.”

“Well you should start—”

“You know what? I need to go. I forgot I had something.” 

He is already standing up mid-way through his poor excuse of an explanation. Clarisse barely has time to stand up herself before he’s out the door. She deliberates for a moment whether or not she should follow him, but decides against it. 

She’s not Beckendorf. She’s not Silena. That won’t change no matter how much they’re needed. 

  
  


\---------------

Suddenly, everyone is getting up and it's only Piper and Percy sitting in front of the fire. He hasn't noticed she's there, lost in thought like he so often is these days. At least, that's what Annabeth tells her. Piper doesn't really know another version of Percy Jackson. She's gotten glimpses of the goofy kid Annabeth had described at the beginning of their quest, but she's yet to meet him again after Tartarus. Piper hasn't hung out with him nearly enough since the war to pretend she actually knows the guy. Yet, they had this huge thing in common. The Seven from the Great Prophecy. 

_Second Great Prophecy,_ a voice in the back of her head reminds her. 

Percy finally feels her gaze on him and turns to look at her. “Oh,” he says, genuinely surprised to see her. “I hadn’t realized you were still here.”

She isn’t really in the mood to talk to Percy, but Piper is too annoyed at Drew to even attempt to go back to her cabin at the moment. She thought things between them had finally started getting better, but then that morning it was like they were back at square one. Even worse, none of her siblings had even tried to defend her. So she gives Percy what she hopes is a kind smile back, but she can feel the annoyance written all over her face. 

“I’ll leave you to it.”

“No, Percy,” she says as he starts getting up. She doesn’t want to be rude to Percy, even if it is only for Annabeth’s sake. Piper knows she’s been worried about him. “Stay, it’s fine. It’s not about you, Drew’s just driving me insane.”

To her surprise, he manages to look a little bit amused, his usually cold eyes taking in the warmer tones of the fire. “Yeah, I’ve heard she’s been a treat to be around lately.”

The sarcasm in his tone is empathetic, and it puts Piper slightly at ease. “Oh yes! The thing is, I thought we were over it, but…”

Percy nods and she finds herself recounting the events of that morning and how they’d been able to talk without lunging at each other before then. 

“I don’t know what I did wrong!” she finishes.

“You didn’t do anything wrong, Piper,” he assures her. “She’s just hurting, that’s all.”

Piper is surprised by the comment, by the understanding she hears behind it. 

“I’m glad she’s got you now. She didn’t need the pressure of leading the cabin.”

Piper considers his words and finally thinks to herself: _I get it._

She hadn’t understood first-hand how someone like Annabeth could fall so hard for someone like Percy, but now she sees it: the fierce caring they both possess, the reason why all the kids at the camp would follow them into war. Percy is good. He doesn’t have to try. 

“She wasn’t too happy when I became head counselor,” she tells him. 

“I don’t think she ever wanted head counselor,” he offers back. “I think she was just holding on to what she had left of her.”

“Her?”

He pulls his eyes away from the fire. “Yeah...Silena.”

Piper falters at the mention of the name. In her cabin, it always remains unspoken. To Piper it feels too far away; heavy, but settled. The way Percy says it now, though...she realizes Silena Beaugard died barely a year ago. The rare intensity in Percy’s eyes tells her that, to him, it probably feels even closer than that. It reminds her of Drew’s anger, but she rarely ever meets Piper’s eyes when she gets in one of her moods. 

“Were you close?” she finds herself asking. If he can give her Silena’s name so freely, maybe he could give her more. 

“Not like she and Clarisse were. I was closer with Beckendorf, her boyfriend. But yeah...she’s one of the first people I met at Camp.”

And now Piper has taken her spot as head counselor and Leo has taken Beckendorf’s and people barely speak their names out loud. 

Piper wants to ask about the betrayal that Drew never fails to mention during the rare times Silena does come up, about the story she’d heard where Percy and Annabeth and Silena and Beckendorf had found Festus, but she doesn’t. She hasn’t heard Percy talk so much in...ever. She doesn’t want to scare him off. 

“She would’ve really liked you. Silena, I mean,” Percy says after a while, finally getting up. 

“Thanks.” 

She looks up and he gives her a small smile. It makes him look younger. 

_He’s barely seventeen._

She watches him leave, feeling like she’s finally met Percy Jackson. Not the one everyone talked about with praise and admiration or the one she felt intimidated by back in their quest, but the one Annabeth mumbles about on a particularly bad day. The one that is human. 

\-------------

Piper goes back to the Aphrodite cabin to find the rest of her siblings in bed. She grabs her pajamas and smiles at Lacy, who is helping their newest and youngest addition to the cabin braid her hair, on her way to the bathroom. She reaches for the door handle but Drew opens the door before she can grab it. Maybe before her talk with Percy she wouldn't have noticed it, but now the slight redness around Drew's eyes lets her know that she's been crying. 

“What, Piper? Stop staring.”

Piper wants to say something, but Drew is already pushing past her, muttering ‘weirdo’ under her breath and drawing the curtains around her bunk before she can get a word out. Piper promises herself she’ll check in with Drew in the morning before she lets herself fall asleep. 

Once the morning comes, however, Drew is nowhere in sight, choosing to skip breakfast altogether. She voices her concern to Annabeth during archery, their first activity of the day. 

“—It’s just that, I talked to Percy yesterday, and—”

“Wait,” Annabeth stops her, putting her bow down, “you talked to Percy?”

Piper tries to play it nonchalant, not taking her eye away from the target in front of her. “Yeah, he was actually really helpful. He’s really sweet.”

She braves a side glance towards her friend and catches her hiding her blush and the smile she tries to bite down before winding back her bow once again. “Well I could’ve told you that for free. What’d he say?”

“He said she was pretty close to Silena.”

Annabeth lets go of the string too early and barely hits her target, clearly surprised by the mention of her old friend. 

“Yeah,” she says without looking at Piper, “she was.”

“I guess I never would’ve guessed it. They way she talks about her now. All I know about her is that she fed some guy that was working with Kronos information.”

Annabeth has gone completely still, gaze fixed on the ground. “Luke could be pretty convincing.” She flexes her fingers and draws back her bow once again, talking while she sizes up her target.

“We never found out how much she gave him, but she told him about a recon mission Percy and Beckendorf were going on a few days before the Battle of Manhattan.”

She lets go of the string. Bullseye. 

“Beck didn’t make it.”

Piper looks on as Annabeth empties the rest of her quiver. She can’t imagine what that type of guilt would do to a person, but has a brief idea from her experience with Polybotes. Piper thought she had nothing in common with the former counselor until then. For the first time, she imagines a girl close to her age, manipulated like she had been, suffering from the consequences she could’ve easily suffered herself. 

When Annabeth finally turns back to her, she’s shocked to see some anger in her grey eyes, but she’s turning around before she can read more into it. 

“It hurts the most when the people you love betray you,” Annabeth tells Piper, putting her stuff away as she does so. “Silena sacrificed her life to make up for her mistake and I don’t doubt she’s in Elysium with Beck, but what about the rest of us? She’s not even here to explain herself. Just because she died doesn’t mean our anger did along with her.”

“I think Drew wants to just be able to miss her, but she can’t stop being angry at her.” 

Before Annabeth leaves she turns back to Piper. The hard anger in her eyes softens slightly when she faces her friend. “Talk to Drew. Gods know the rest of us should’ve a long time ago.”

Piper decides to do just that, making a mental note to have her own conversation with Annabeth once she’s cooled down a bit. She looks for her sister for almost an hour until she finally finds her at the end of the dock, deep in thought while her perfectly complicated sandal brushes the water. 

“I swear it’s harder to get privacy in this camp than phone reception.”

Piper chuckles and plops down beside her. “You have to see the irony in you saying that, right?” she asks Drew. “I recall you sending Lacy to track me and Jason’s every move when we first started dating. Remember when she fell off the tree?”

Drew can’t muscle-down a small smile when she remembers Lacy coming back to her, scraped up and covered in twigs followed by a really pissed off Piper. 

“She’s actually a great climber. She just got excited when she saw Jason finally kiss you.”

Piper laughs. “I know she is. I keep telling her to go for the lava wall but she doesn’t want to.”

“I’ll get her to go,” Drew says, determined. Piper might’ve catalogued it as pushiness a year ago, but she knows for a fact Drew adores Lacy. “It’s about time we got a leg up on the satyrs. They’ve been kicking our ass in that wall since I got here.”

“Good.”

Piper lets the silence settle between them, trying to play it off as her enjoying the beautifully sunny day, but Drew’s too perceptive and has little patience. 

“You going to tell me why you’ve been acting all weird?”

“ _I’ve_ been acting weird?”

Drew looks back at her, unrelenting. Piper takes note of the fact that, even though she’s clearly going through something and has obviously been crying, she still had time to paint a rainbow in each of her eyelids. 

“Drew...c’mon.”

“What?”

“You’ve been crying.”

“I have allergies. Not that it’s any of your business.”

Piper rolls her eyes at her stubbornness. “I know for a fact that you don’t have allergies, Drew.”

“Oh so you’re an expert on me, now?”

“No!” Piper exclaims, her frustration finally getting the best of her. “But I’d like to be! You’re my sister! You know how long I’ve wanted siblings?”

“Oh, was it terribly lonely in your luxurious mansion?”

“Do you go out of your way to be this impossible? I’m trying here, okay?” Piper rubs her face, grasping for the right thing to say, even though she knows that, whatever it is, Drew will find a way to twist it. “I talked to Percy.”

That catches her attention. She looks away from the ends of her hair she was inspecting and back towards Piper. “Jackson?”

“No, Weasley. Yes, Jackson.”

Impossibly, her face softens. “What about?”

“You. “ 

Drew brings her knees up, hugging them to her chest and resting her face on top. Piper finds that she looks almost as young as she is. “I used to tell everyone I had a crush on him when we were little. I always figured that if I had to like a guy, it’d be him.”

Drew is more than out now. Piper struggles to think back to a time where she was closeted, but, apparently, it wasn’t too long ago. 

“I probably would’ve picked Charlie if Silena hadn’t had had her eye on him since the beginning of time.” She notices Piper’s confusion. “Beckendorf, I mean. He used to hate people calling him Charlie but he just glowed when Silena did.”

Piper didn’t even have to push her that much. Silena came up easily. It made her wonder how long Drew has been keeping everything to herself, how badly she’s been wanting to talk about her but just didn’t know how. 

“And Percy was so much like him. I know he went out of his way to act like him, too. Everyone acted so confused; they didn’t get what Silena saw in him because he wasn’t ‘traditionally handsome’,” she says, making air quotes and rolling her own eyes, “whatever _that_ means. But he was really charming. He wasn’t corny about it either. He was good.”

Piper tries to ignore the tears welling up in her sister’s eyes, knowing she’ll try to hide them behind some snarky remark and she’ll lose whatever moment they are having. 

“He was good and they made sense because she was too. You couldn’t even be mad at her for being so perfect because she made you feel perfect right back.” She lets go of her legs, carefully wiping her eyes so as not to ruin her makeup. But the tears don’t stop. 

“And then she...she fucking ruined it, is what she did. She killed him. She _killed_ Charlie.”

“Drew.”

“Don’t! Don’t even try to defend her, Piper! You didn’t even _know_ her!” She’s lost it, sobbing, gulping for air between words. “I don’t care that she didn’t mean to do it! I don’t care how long she’d known Luke! She took Charlie. She took Percy as well. He was never the same after that. And then she took my sister! She left me here! She didn’t have to see the good sucked out of the world! I _hate_ her!”

Piper doesn’t know what to do, isn’t comfortable with seeing people be this raw and vulnerable. But something pushes her forward and urges her to wrap her arms around her sister. Drew fights her at first, hitting her forearms, trying to pull away, but just as quickly she’s melting into Piper. 

“I hate her! I hate her! I hate her.”

  
  


\----------------

Last time, Percy remembers as he slashes away at yet another fresh batch of hay dummies, he'd taken on the curse to win. 

_I have to,_ he’d told Achilles, _Otherwise I don’t stand a chance._

‘I have to.’ It was never a choice. He’d barely listened to what Achilles had to say, more interested in figuring out Luke’s own weak spot, defeating him, winning the war. 

_You have sealed your doom_ , he’d told Percy. Maybe he was finally beginning to understand what he meant. Because they’d won, twice now, and there was no glory in it. They’d won and he’d felt more of a thrill during the fight than afterwards. They’d won and he could go back to being normal, to going to Goode with Rachel and thinking about college with Annabeth. 

He tears through the last dummy, chaos around him but not a drop of sweat on his brow. He’s itching for more, for a challenge. He holds Riptide like a lifeline and forgets that it’s not her who pulled him out of the Styx. 

_Lose sight of what keeps you mortal, and the River Styx will burn you to ashes._

He’d drunk lava. What was the River Styx compared to the Phlegathon? He’d brought a volcano to its knees. 

_Didn’t you realize how useless it all is? All the heroics – being pawns of the gods._

He hadn’t stopped thinking about Luke since they made it out of Tartarus, the word “pawn” bouncing around his head until the voices that seemed to live there nowadays couldn’t call him anything but that. He looks down at Riptide, her perfect hilt that has always fit perfectly into his hand. He barely hears it clatter to the ground. 

He can't stop the tremors this time. They rip his balance from him until he stumbles to the ground. 

_Stop. Stop. Stop._

Why couldn’t he just stop? Control himself? Why couldn’t he just be happy for Clarisse? Move on with his life? 

Why couldn’t everything just stop?

He clenches his hands, but the movement just forces the shaking up his arms until he can feel it pick up the pace of his heartbeat. Somewhere in the back of his head, he knows he’s having a panic attack, knows that Will told him what to do, but he can’t remember any of that right now. 

He’s hyper-aware of his foot against the ground, of the flimsy sole of his shoe being the only thing that separates them, of the tremors traveling from his fist against his thigh, down his leg. 

Percy no longer knows where the shaking is coming from, but there’s a familiar pull in his gut.

_Stop. Stop. Stop._

“Percy?”

Clarisse has known for a while now that Percy was going to crack. It felt too familiar to the boy she nursed back to health after being lost in the labyrinth. 

“Percy,” she repeats now, a few feet away from his shaking form on the ground. “Percy, listen to me, you’re having a panic attack, you need to breathe.” She watches him shake his head, hears the rasp of his uneven breathing. Carefully, she takes a step towards him. “Percy, look around you. Tell me three things you see.”

Will would be better at this. Chiron. Annabeth. But the sight is not completely foreign to her and they’re not around right now, so she keeps advancing towards him. 

“Three things, Jackson. Tell me three things you can see.”

Unlike the other times with Chris, though, she sees the cracks form under his feet, feels the wind pick up. Her own panic starts creeping in. Because, unlike Chris, Clarisse knows now that he _is_ “big three material” as she’d so naively joked about all those years ago. She knows that a lapse in control for Percy puts everyone else at risk, not just him.

There’s campers gathering behind her. She’s torn between yelling at them to get away or refraining from making any sudden movements, anything that could trigger Percy further. She’s only seen his power increase with the years. Gods only know what he’s capable of doing now.

Clarisse is almost right behind him, less than two feet away from him. Every time she gets closer the tremors in the ground become more and more apparent. She can hear that a loud crowd has formed behind her. They must feel the ground shaking as well. 

She can almost reach out and touch him when suddenly the ground shakes so hard she almost loses her balance. 

“Percy!”

She guesses it’s the fear in her voice that makes him turn around. It quickly dissipates when she sees his own fear in his eyes. Everything about him screams at her to help him, but she’s still aware of the people behind her. “Percy, calm down,” she implores. 

For the first time he notices the crowd and his eyes widen in horror. She watches him clench his fists so hard she knows it’ll draw blood, a flash of pain marring his features. She watches him try so hard to control something he never asked for, something no one can fully teach him how to manage, because he’s realized that—above everything else—she’s protecting the crowd from him. 

The shaking lessens slightly and Clarisse holds Percy’s gaze. She takes a chance and reaches for his hand. When he doesn’t pull away she wraps her hand around his, kneeling in front of him so the crowd can’t see him. 

“You good?” she asks. 

“Give me a second,” he tells her. All it means is that he’s working on reeling in whatever potential disaster they’re on the verge of. Clarisse knows he’s clearly not fine. 

She stands up, making sure to continue blocking him from view and tries to harden her features as she faces the group of kids. “Can I help you with something?” she calls out. “I’m pretty sure y’all have activities to tend to.”

They hesitate, trying to look past her to get a look at Percy. She barely recognizes any of them, just the new additions to her cabin and Lacy from the Aphrodite cabin. Clarisse watches her pull several people back. 

“You heard her, move along!”

Their eyes meet briefly and soon the crowd has dispersed. Clarisse turns back to Percy, who now sits with his head between his knees. 

“I’m good,” he tells her before she can say anything else. He picks his head up and brushes the dirt off his jeans as he stands, checking his pocket for Riptide. “Thanks,” he offers, avoiding her eyes. 

Her stomach clenches with guilt. “Percy.”

“Just leave, Clarisse,” he tells the ground. “Get out of here.”

There’s no venom behind the words; it’s not aggressive. Underneath it, all she hears is: _Leave, because you can._

“No,” she tells him, because she knows that once she does he’ll be too far for her to ever reach him again. “Percy, please.” She doesn’t know what she’s pleading for, just that, not for the first time, she feels way too small for the world they’ve spent their lives saving. 

“It’s okay,” he lies and she immediately remembers him handing her the Golden Fleece. She sees him kneeling above Silena’s body and walking into camp after Beckendorf was blown up in front of him. “It’ll be okay.”

She’d fought for every quest she’d ever gotten, had resented Percy for years for being handed mission after mission. How she savored it now. The option to stop fighting. All she had to do was leave. Another wave of heroes would take her place, wash away her name like waves did messages in the sand. It was a blessing to be forgotten and a curse to be remembered. 

Once again, someone else would fight for her, die in her place, because that’s what all the great heroes have in common. That was the price for the glory she’d aspired to her entire life, the one that Percy had been showered with ever since Poseidon claimed him. The one that had taken so much for him that she barely recognizes the kid standing in front of her.

She steps back.

“It’s okay, Clarisse.” 

It wasn’t. She hates herself every second more as she finally turns away, rushing to her cabin and packing what she can with her shaking hands. Sherman stops her on her way out. He is fifteen. Not the oldest, but the one she’s chosen to take over her in her absence. She won’t be able to do it if she thinks about the death she has probably set him up for, so she stalks past him, squeezing his shoulder on her way out. 

Chris is mid-conversation when she finds him in the Hermes cabin. He goes to her immediately when he sees the terror on her face. “What—”

“—we need to leave.” She reaches out and cups his face, forcing him to stare right into her eyes. “Now.”

They don’t even call for Argus to take them to the station. They walk past camp borders until they’re far enough to call a cab. Chris doesn’t say anything as Clarisse sobs into his shoulder. She’s never been more scared in her life, has never truly appreciated how fragile it is. She runs away with it, praying that the gods consider her insignificant and let her leave, knowing most are not so lucky. 

\------------

Annabeth makes sure to knock before letting herself into the Poseidon cabin. In the months that have followed the Giant War, she’s learned to deal with Percy’s bad days, but they still push her off-kilter. It’s been a humble realization, knowing that there’s no plan she can draft up to deal with this, no one set of specific things she can do—one after the other—to make him better, to make him hurt less. 

She hates that it was Clarisse who found him and not her. She hates the way people won't meet her eyes, the way they whisper about Percy as if he isn’t that same kid that went missing almost a year ago. Annabeth knows he’s still there, sees some of him staring back at her through what he’s been forced to become, but also knows that they’ll never go back to who they were the summer after the first war. 

So she takes off her shoes as she closes the door behind her, and pads her way to his bed. He’s laying on his side, turning away from her. But he reaches back for her hand once he feels her sit behind him. Annabeth immediately registers how hot it is against her palm and checks his forehead with her free hand. 

“You’ve got a fever.”

He hums in response, seemingly not bothered. He brings her hand closer to him, so she's forced to lay down beside him, almost spooning him. Annabeth knows Percy is especially fond of this position, with her body protecting what used to be his Achilles spot. 

“Percy,” she huffs, right behind his head, bristling some of the dark hairs behind his neck. “You should probably go see Will.”

“He won’t be able to fix this,” he says, almost a whisper.

It’s such a still moment, yet Annabeth’s heart is pounding in her chest, her blood rushing with anger. She feels so useless when he’s like this. But she has her own bad days, and he sticks around always, even if it’s just to make everything smoother around the edges. So she takes a steady breath and tries a different approach. 

“What is it that he won’t be able to fix?”

He sighs and she can almost see his eyebrows scrunching together, grasping for the words to describe exactly what he’s feeling. 

“I…” he starts then falters, but she waits for him to continue. “I haven’t told you something.”

She scoots closer to him, wrapping her arm tighter around him and pressing her face in between his shoulder blades. In the beginning, she wanted to know it all. Understand in detail every memory that haunted Percy, every venomous thought that crossed his mind when he was at his lowest point. But Percy was fiercely protective, in his own way. Annabeth remembers how he stood over her when she took that knife for him what feels like a lifetime ago. 

_“Nobody touches her!”_

Not even his nightmares. 

It’d be hypocritical of her to hold it against him when she’d been the one to shield him first. 

So when she went crying to Chiron one of the many nights when he’d woken up screaming and wouldn’t tell her why, and he’d told her to respect his boundaries—boundaries that didn’t exist between them before he was taken from her—she yielded. 

“That’s okay,” she reassures him. “I...you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

“I want to tell you now,” he assures her and she waits for him to continue talking. His voice is shaking once he finally does. “I don’t know why I thought it could just be washed away.”

“What could?”

He hesitates, but he eventually brings her hand back and places it in his lower back, a spot that would be perfectly covered by his armor, what was once his one link to the mortal world. 

He shudders when her fingers touch his skin under his shirt and she has to replay what he just said to her before she understands. 

“Percy.” He rolls slightly on his back so she can see his face. His eyes look piercingly green against his flushed cheeks. He looks defeated but he doesn’t stop staring at her, not until he knows she’s understood. “When did you know?” she asks him. 

“I started feeling weird a few weeks ago...and then…”

“And then what?”

“And then I realized I couldn’t get hurt anymore.”

“Percy—”

“It’ll never stop, Annabeth,” he whispers. “We’ll never win. Not for good anyways... They’ll never stop needing me.”

If it was anyone else, Annabeth would’ve mistaken what Percy just said for arrogance. But no matter what happens to Percy Jackson, he’ll never gain an arrogant bone in his body. He’s never been interested in his power. She knows it’s terrified him from day one. 

“Percy, we can leave. We’ve earned it.”

Percy turns around so he is lying directly in front of her and takes her face in his hands. “It doesn’t matter, Annabeth. If this was fair we wouldn’t have been in a single fight, not to mention a war. This was never fair.”

Annabeth wants to look away. The intensity in his eyes is almost manic and it scares the hell out of her. But she clings to his words, words that sound too much like Luke’s, and turns them over in her head. “We can walk away,” she insists.

“I don’t know if _I_ can.”

Nothing he’s ever said has scared her more than that. They were a team. Through everything, in spite of everything, they’d been a team. “What are you saying?”

“I’m killing them. By not fighting, I’m killing them.”

“None of that—” she begins to say, but can’t get the words right. She remembers the conversation she had with Piper that morning. If she could say something to get rid of his guilt, she would’ve a long time ago. But she tries anyway. “That’s not on you.”

“The advantage of fighting like an army is that you don’t need an actual army to win,” he says because maybe some of the tactician in her has rubbed off on him or maybe because he’s one of the smartest people she knows. Either way, she understands why people are annoyed at her when she’s right. “I stay behind so they don’t have to.”

He says it like a secret. She lets her eyes wander to the tear dripping off his nose onto the pillow, leaving a darker patch of blue where it lands. 

It’s more a realization than anything else. As much as she wishes this particular part of Percy would change, she knows there’s nothing to do. _Personal loyalty._ It’d never sounded worse than _hubris._ How could kindness be a flaw? Only now, after they’d taken one too many hits, did she see the damage it could do. 

_You do not know when it is time to cut your losses. To save a friend, you would sacrifice the world._

It's taken years for Percy to admit to her what Athena had told him all that time ago, a lifetime ago. Athena might have thought Percy foolish enough to equate his sacrifices with tragic casualties, or losses for the gods. But Percy wasn’t as ignorant as he’d once been. He’d no longer put the world at danger.

“You do know I’ll never let you fight by yourself, right?” she tells him after a while. Because, not so long ago, she got to experience what that felt like, and she’ll take the battles any day of the week. She wants to forget the world, but that has never been her either. 

“I don’t think it’ll always be up to you.”

“We’ll see about that.”

“There’s only so many knives you can take for me.”

She traces his eyebrow with her pointer finger, featherlight. “I’ll be quicker. I’ll get stronger. I’ll be my own army.”

For a second, some of that old fire burns behind his eyes, ready for an argument. But, instead, he tucks closer to Annabeth so his feverish forehead rests inside the crook of her neck and sobs. She holds him tightly to her and wishes, not for the first time, that Percy Jackson had never crossed camp borders the day they met. She wishes Sally Jackson had kept on driving. She wishes the gods had chosen anyone else and she knows it’s selfish, but she understands wholeheartedly the grief Percy is consumed by. 

They’re mourning their own lives. But, for once, she doesn’t look forward. Just clings to now. 

***********

description: A comic page with a light blue-gray overlay and a smokey background. Percy is gripping a sink in his orange camp shirt and a pair of jeans. He's looking at his reflection in the mirror with tired and scared eyes. His grip becomes too strong and the sink breaks with a loud red crack.

Image Description: A drawing of Percy and Annabeth lying down and cuddling. Annabeth is the big spoon and is comforting Percy, who looks upset. Annabeth says, “You do know I’ll never let you fight by yourself, right?” Percy replies, “I don’t think it’ll always be up to you.” Annabeth responds, “We’ll see about that.” End Image Description.  
  



End file.
